It’s here – the new Open Collections portal arrived this week! Touted as a one-stop web-based, openly and publicly accessible digital collections portal, it is a treasure trove of 100,000+ digital objects and 65,000+ items with full-text and 7+ million pages of full-text that are unique to UBC.
With a unified interface and research platform for locally created and managed open access digital collections of scholarly materials, these collections are currently managed in the Library’s digital repositories: cIRcle, CONTENTdm, and AtoM. (Note: Open access datasets in Dataverse will be incorporated into Open Collections later this year).
This new portal houses a plethora of digital content ranging from photographs, maps, videos, podcasts, books and book chapters, journal articles, and more. It is filled with advanced tools to help researchers augment their research skills via the Open Collections Research API, enabling them to “run powerful queries, perform advanced analysis, and build custom views, apps, and widgets with full access to the Open Collections’ metadata and transcripts”. Explore access to the Open Collections Research API and learn more about the API Documentation
As part of Open Collections, the collections in cIRcle were refined to increase discoverability and access to UBC research materials. For example, departmental faculty collections have been aggregated into one general collection called “Faculty Research and Publications” in Open Collections. Rather than having to use a collection URL to find material, you can use the Advanced Search to find all materials from a previous cIRcle collection by searching for the collection name, affiliation, or any other term of interest at: https://open.library.ubc.ca/search/advanced. You can then embed these searches into your website using specific terms, a search widget, or an RSS Feed. One of the most significant advantages of this is that you no longer need to create multiple unique collections or to map items to collections in order to find related material.
Other Open Collections’ highlights, to name just a few, include:
- Faceted search results display
- Unique interactions with books, newspapers and photo albums
- Embedded metadata in the HTML for improved search engine harvesting and findability
- Responsive design accommodating any device or screen resolution
- Full screen object viewer with a variety of enhanced features
- Usage statistics over time
- Download, cite, share, embed and comment services for each item
Happy searching and exploring Open Collections!